Frequently Asked Questions

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31. How do I convert an image from RGB to CMYK?

The software ImageMagick can do this. This can also be done in Photoshop and other tools. But ImageMagick works in both Windows, macOS and Linux (Ubuntu etc) and also has an interface in plenty of programming languages. And it is free.

Read more about sRGB and CMYK color model on Wikipedia.
Read more about ICC profile (color profile) on Wikipedia.

As an example we have a small sRGB PNG.
gforce:Desktop jerker$ identify start.image.png start.image.png PNG 448x54 448x54+0+0 8-bit sRGB 4101B 0.000u 0:00.009 gforce:Desktop jerker$
First convert the sRGB PNG into a sRGB TIFF.
gforce:Desktop jerker$ convert start.image.png start.image.tiff gforce:Desktop jerker$
Then convert the sRGB TIFF into a CMYK TIFF.
gforce:Desktop jerker$ convert start.image.tiff -colorspace CMYK output.image.tiff gforce:Desktop jerker$
Confirm that the resulting image is a CMYK TIFF.
gforce:Desktop jerker$ identify output.image.tiff output.image.tiff TIFF 448x54 448x54+0+0 8-bit CMYK 2376B 0.000u 0:00.000 gforce:Desktop jerker$

The command line tool seems to work fine in Windows as well:

This entry rgb.to.cmyk was last modified 2018-03-22

This documentation is covered by GNU Free Documentation License.